


A witch, an unkindness

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jonsa Exchange, prompt: fairtytale/myth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-13 13:59:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14750211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: “Hello, Brother,” she whispers through the dark.





	A witch, an unkindness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Queenofthebees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queenofthebees/gifts).



> For the jonsa exchange on tumblr
> 
> This was a weird one to write. It’s told in 12 parts and there are women who might be witches, men who are wolves, a brave dead knight and siblings with strange fates.
> 
> So, yeah, fairytale-esque, I guess, take what you can from it, there are no others, there's some mix of books and show here, you need to know that in rickon was sent to skaggos in the books and that book ramsay had a wife who he locked in a tower until she ate her own hand, book brienne faced hanging at one point in time, and catelyn was/is a zombie

**I.**

They say her sister and her youngest brother are wolves, another a pelt, one more an unkindness, her father a head, her mother a witch, and she a murderess.

And when she arrives North again, by magic, (or by deceit), it is not the easy thing she has been seeking.

To sit in her father’s seat is to feel cold hands leashing each wrist and hollow.

And her time in the South has been no song, though how the tale has traveled, in each iteration makes it seem some ballad of a girl whose been dead longer than she’d ever been alive.

It is still winter in the North and it has been for so very long a time.

 

-

 

Her sister and brother all wolves, except for one who only wished to fly, and her, who could not decide and found somehow in her dreams, she'd died.

But, it hadn't been her, it was only a wolf she let warm her feet, who allowed bath and brush and sat dumbly for it all.

And all but her had found some new place to run; the woods or rocky coast, the grave, the sky, the very place beneath her tread.

 

-

 

And when they killed her father his face turn black and lost its shape and she could still see him in the mess of it.

 

-

 

And when they killed her brother they made him a mummer’s farce that she dreamed she’d dreamed of.

 

-

 

And when they burned her mother they called it a welcoming and she took from a pile hot bones and ash.

 

-

 

And she never saw her sister again.

 

-

 

And her smallest brother was lost.

 

-

 

And only the one who flew could hear her under pale branches and dark leaves.

 

-

 

And it had been so long since someone had spoken of some other, though it was the wind that spoke anew of it, of the pale, dark one that she hasn’t thought on since she was a girl, the haunt they’d all forgotten. The trees whisper of him now.

 

**II.**

 

A great wall stood once, shattered blocks and bones and black cloaks.

Once.

 

-

 

Her families’ keep is serviceable, it’s bleak warmth everywhere some reminder of a girlhood she had barely known.

It was great once, too.

 

-

 

Her stitches have always been neat and straight and tidy, careful things.

If she’s wished a man dead on his name day and drunk sweet wine to it, who has she told?

If she has stitched misfortune and bad humors into the seams, who would accuse?

If she once poisoned an unworthy king, who can prove it?

 

-

 

The doll her father had given her is a worn thing now, its chipped face and hands sharp on her fingertips, its silk stained and its hair torn free.

It is a childish thing, to mend it but when she is finished it is made of her.

Snags of hair in her comb’s teeth and crescent-moons of pared fingernails, one small finger’s blooding to color its mouth and rouge its cheeks.

She fills it with rags of the dresses she’s worn and the bed linens she’s burned, with rage and with patience.

 

-

 

The bells ring in hope of banishment across a city to be sacked, they ring for weddings and for dread, they ring for the mincing dancer’s steps.

The peals are for dirges and for victory.

There are no bells in Winterfell and Sansa Stark is glad.

A horn was said to fell the Wall once, a bell might bring down her own home about her ears.

The North is a different place than the South she’s traveled from.

 

**III.**

 

A woman alone is a bleeding creature or a wound to be staunched, and she knows how men have wished to staunch her wounds.

She is no wolf, like her father, and she is no raven, like her brother, she is some sweet summer child who has learned songs and stiches and craft.

She has survived so long, but even she wonders how much longer it will do.

 

-

 

At night she can hear the footfalls of a padded beast's foot, the whup of it’s passage along the tapestry lined hall.

In the dark the pale beast's hide is like snow or starlight.

“Hello, Brother,” she whispers through the dark.

 

-

 

There is hate in him, for her; she is her mother’s daughter.

He has qualms.

Once it might have been he could not leave, as much as she could not stay, but they are children no more and her mother is dead, the magic is gone and the world is a darker, bleaker place of little good prospect for either of them.

 

-

 

“Well, you’ve come back. Now, what do you want?” he asks, voice an unused, rusted sword.

“Monsters are coming to take our home from us. Will you or won’t you help?”

“You are the Lady of Winterfell now, you could tell me to hide my face and I would have no choice but to do so until your death.”

Like your mother did, he does not say, that she still hears.

“Is that all you’ve been made to do? Hide your face?” she questions, less tremulous than she might have were she still some stupid girl.

She has been made to do many things, he has only ever been told to keep out of sight and out from underfoot.

“I’ve been able to watch.” 

“…”

“I watched your mother burn,” he says from the dark corners of the room.

“Do you think she would have called for help while she was burning if they had not cut out her tongue first?”

“No.”

“No,” she agrees.

But she is, she does not need to say so when he already knows, she is asking for his help and he has no choice but to give it.

  

**VI.**

 

He played at knights once, champions and heroes. He is a beast from beneath the stone, sent there, unclaimed and unwanted and her mother had not been wrong in it.

For all her brothers were beasts, and her sister too.

Her mother knew what beasts of different blood could do, though.

And Sansa cannot hate her mother for it, but she does not hate the man who was a boy she thought to be her brother once either.

 

-

 

“How did you return?”

“How do you think?”

“You grew leather wings and flew, of course," he repeats the tale that others still speak.

She sighs. “I bargained what precious things I had and rode in a cart, and then I was caught and I had to be some other girl for awhile and endure what girls endure in war and then I killed one man, and then another and then it was my fortune to find a knight who my mother sent to me, a true knight.”

“Where are they now?” he asks, unperturbed by her litany of acts.

“True knights die first in war. I could not stop to bury them beside the road so I left them for the crows.”

“You’re wrong," he tells her before he goes. "Pretty girls die first in war, not the knights. Some of them even like to kill pretty girls.”

 She only hun assent into the coming night.

-

 

“How did you survive?” she asks.

He looks at her, staring at her hair in the light.

“I had kind a brother, and sister too.”

But only one, she thinks. Just one.

But, their sister is gone and he has but her and she him.

They are similar creatures, having had to make due in the absence of others of their blood, whosever blood that may be.

 

**V.**

 

The white is marred by the red, he pets blood into the beast’s coat.

 

-

 

He is always cold and always hungry and he never sleeps, he has been too long below. His sister is some restless thing beside him in the empty hall with full hearths glowing all around them.

She does not sleep at night.

 

-

 

She tells him of the houses with their many colorful sigils in the distance, amassing like crows to peck at their eyes and faces and take the buttons from their clothes and the hair from their skulls.

“They want what is ours.”

“They want what is yours,” he corrects without humor or ire.

“They will not champion a woman.”

“So what will you do?”

“Would you make me marry?”

“I don’t care if you walk out into the snow. It matters not what you do. Not to me.”

“Then you may have this keep, so long as it is also my home.”

“I don’t want this place. I’ve been here for as long as you’ve been gone, there is no one here who I have loved.”

“You don’t love me brother?”

“Duty is not love, sister. You are not your brother, you are not your father. You are your mother. Good night.”

He leaves her on the battlements.

 

-

 

“I never would have put you below,” she tells him.

He does not answer her with words.

“I would have only killed you, if I thought your absence killed my husband’s favorite son.”

“So, you are not your mother. That does not make you better than her.”

“No, it makes me worse. Jon.”

 

**VI.**

 

Men have always taken what they want, hateful of the woman who would do the same as if they have some kind of claim on it.

This she knows as well as she knows her name.

 

-

 

And her name is _Stark_.

 

-

 

Stannis Baratheon sits in her hall with his own red witch and her brother chews his meat like it is glass.

The woman stares back at her, like a mirror peering at it’s own endless reflection.

Outside they speak but Sansa remembers naught of it.

Inside her brother and King share icy silence beside each other.

It is some folly of life, a fancy of actors, but who is real and who is upon some greater stage Sansa Stark cannot the see.

The Red Woman tells her about the night and its great terrors and she can only smile back and remark that the bright day has proved itself so full of the same.

 

-

 

A woman, she hears has been wifed and starved and has eaten her own flesh in the cold.

The tale spreads and the grim name Stark is still a name worth its land to wife.

In her cold chambers she waits, knowing a raven will come soon, marriage or the knife, a fall, or fire, some death that will find her should she acquiesce as a lady might.

Something of the lady she might have been has died, something of it has rotten and been burned away, or stolen.

At the chamber door a wolf sniffs, she lets it in and it sleeps upon her feet.

She thinks of who will protect her, or if anyone should.

She remembers childhood games, she the princess and her brothers the knights.

 

**VII.**

 

“Usurpers all shall burn,” decrees the king, horses trotting in a tight circle in the yard.

Beside him, his sister drops to her knees.

He follows, pledging empty words to a man who smells like death and char.

Later, his sister will tell him that she has scented the same.

 

-

 

“We need his men if we are to survive,” she says.

He smiles grimly at her. “ _You_ need his men.”

“Will you wander off again and leave another to die who you might have saved?”

He bares his teeth and steps close, too close, she strikes his face with her cold palm.

“You abandoned my brother, your _lord_ , for the snow and the freedom of a beast, what greatness has it brought you but a tomb to keep you and a barren cell to trap you. I set you free from it, do not think it was a gift, brother.”

She has drawn blood with her nails, he scratches at the mark when she has gone.

 

-

 

“Your brother was a fool, he would not have died if he had not been so stupid,” he tells her.

“I know. He was always stupid.”

“You were always a little fool.”

“That has changed.”

“I know, you’ve survived.”

Somehow, he thinks.

“I’ve been taught how.”

“Who taught you?”

“The men who killed my father and the women my father betrayed.”

“What women?”

“My mother, the queen.”

“What betrayals were these?”

“You, to my mother. Mercy, to the queen. My father tried so hard to be a good man, but a good man would know how to sacrifice. He would have left you to die and he would have killed the Queen and her children with the truth of their blood.”

“A good man kills children then?”

“To protect, to keep from war, less than that even. Yes.”

 

**VIII.**

 

“Must it matter whose bastard I am?”

“No.”

And she kisses him and he is silenced, she kisses him and he is surprised.

 

-

 

He watched her mother at her mirror.

And, once, she found him staring back at her in it.

It is only one of the things that led him to be placed below before he knew there was such a thing to earn by hate of him.

 

-

 

Once, he thought he was brave.

Until he left with wilder men who knew the ways of beasts, who taught him like the trees and birds taught the boy who was his brother once.

He remembers Bran, he’s seen him fly.

And, he remember Robb, a boy king in wolf skin, going off to battle, becoming a man who died.

He remembers where he had been, in his own true skin, not running to the south to help or to fight. He remembers the blood in his mouth when he had been a beast, the woman he lays with, the wrenching in his heart and in his lungs.

Catelyn Stark was not unkind but she was unforgiving, and she came back from the South changed, a half-life thing full of curses for him.

And so it went.

 

-

 

He can hear her in the godswood, speaking to a boy who was taken by a North even he has not seen.

He listens but cannot make out her words from around the wind.

 

-

 

At night he dreams of ravens and all their eyes.

 

**IX.**

 

“She cannot do that!”

“Ramsay,” a sterner man says, quieting his bastard with a word.

 

The King is pitiless. “I would have suggested you ensure your bastard well versed in matters of his hopeful station before raising him to it. Lady Stark petitioned for her natural brother to be legitimized so he might have rightful claim to house Stark, he has been legitimized and this nonsense of whose house will be Warden is solved and is as it should be. Go if you have no more concerns, I have much more to address.”

 

-

 

“But you are not the son of Eddard Stark,” the red woman says.

“Men may keep all kinds of secrets if they don’t know they are going to die,” he replies.

“You are a Stark, but you are so much more than that. You might be wolf and dawn, or wolf and blood and fire.”

 

-

 

“Stark!”

“My king.”

“Walk with me.”

The man who was a wolf walks beside a king who does not know he is to die. 

-

 

Winterfell has been his for many years, though below.

And now they call it his for true.

But Jon Snow is no fool.

The girl he has called sister is as much as her lady mother had hoped to be, as much as she ever was.

He understands his place, part and parcel he is but some thing she has taken for her own, like Winterfell, like her father’s seat, like the ideal of a true Northern Lady like she took the one of a true Southron one, once.

It is unfair, he knows, to think of her as some flipping coin, two sided with two strange faces.

But it is not untrue.

He might gaze at her and find Catelyn Tully, he might look at her and see Eddard Stark.

 

**X.**

 

“You will burn like her mother did, and at dawn I will marry her here. Do you hear me bastard?”

“Aye. I hear you," Jon Snow tells the cruel boy with a bow.

 

-

 

They burn him as a man and he screams.

Through the fire Sansa Stark looks like her mother a fallen banner at her feet, a man's hand in her hair.

 

-

 

He howls.

He hunts.

He waits to be called home again.

 

-

 

Dawn comes and it is a cruel man’s life blood on his tongue and in his fur.

A woman kneels into the mess of it beside him and pets hands through his fur.

“Come brother.”

And he follows her home again.

 

-

 

Her knife must be sharp now, the sound of it a voice of its own upon the whetstone.

She cuts her own finger on it and bloods the steel of it.

He is the beast at her feet for a night more sitting up to lick at the tiny wound.

She startles and then rests herself, he resettles and they watch the fire die.

 

**XI.**

 

He walks free in the skin of a wolf.

She feels something, a pang of regret, a flash of resentment, how much might she have done, how much might she have escape if such a course were hers to take, she thinks.

She cuts him free of his shadow and his pelt, of tooth and claw and he steams in the snow turned to red gore that’s stained her knees into her heavy skirts, that’s wet her boots, she's had practice in skinning men though it be only her second one.

 

-

 

It is not so hard a thing, to kill a thing. It happens all the time. It happens that she has done such before.

And so, it is done again.

Jon Snow is but a man and she has killed his wolf.

 

-

 

“You are kissed by fire,” he tells her, unhappily.

“No more than you,” she answers, unsmiling.

 

-

 

“How did you survive?” he asks her as she should be asking him, again he is asking.

“I found a protector.”

“Yes, your knight. That your mother sent, did you fall in love with him like in the songs?”

His sister smiles.

“If she had been a man I might have, if she had been alive, maybe. My knight was hung at the crossroads with her armor piled below, defiled and put there beside some man my mother thought to trade for me.”

“The dead can’t rise.”

“But, you did. And, so did she and my knight.”

“I was never really dead and your mother was a hateful thing and your knight could be a story too.”

“Being dead doesn’t feel like we think it would.”

“How would you know?”

“The knight told me so on our travels.”

 

**XII.**

 

“I did not want this,” he hisses into her shoulder against the falling shadow of her hair across his brow.

She hushes him, smiling where he cannot see.

“Wants and whims are not are own. You wished to be my protector once, when we were small. Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he rasps across the damp stretch of throat before his humid mouth, raking his teeth across it, sharp-mouthed. “And you always played the princess.”

“Queen,” she corrects, nails carding gently up his nape through the coarseness of the paler hair he hides. “I was always meant to be the queen.” She reaches high and falls again, like a sword, like a woman.

He shudders against her.

Howls.

 

-

 

In her chamber she sits before her mirror, white fur pooled low around her hips and lap, breasts pale and shadowed in the half glow of the firelight.

He looks at her and thinks she is beautiful and that he would do anything for her and he wonders if this feeling is what Ned Stark felt for Catelyn Tully.

He’s not so much the fool as the man who might have been his father, he knows well that many beautiful things can kill many men.

And he knows that his sister is some wolf still, and he wonders if it was a lady who died and not some beast beside a river under their father’s sword, if something wild survived where only grace and song had been.

The eyes in the mirror that find his from the half pulled curtains of the bed around him gleam, when Sansa Stark turns it is not a girl looking back at him.

 

 


End file.
